Every religion, whether Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, or New Age, must somehow address the problem of pain . . . What difference does Christian faith make, specifically? What resources can Christians fall back on?

     By asking that, we have, in a sense, circled back to the opening question, "Where is God when it hurts?" . . . It is a question that every suffering person eventually asks. Where is God? How does He feel about my plight? Does He care?

The lark's on the wing
The snail's on the thorn
God's in his heaven
All's right with the world.

 

     Robert Browning wrote those words in the mid-nineteenth century, an era of boundless optimism. But after two world wars and two atomic bomb attacks, the Holocaust, and numerous genocides and mass famines around the globe, few people would now dare to say, "All's right with the world." Worse, God seems to stay in his heaven despite all that's wrong with the world. Why doesn't He do something?

Keeping His Own Rules

     Old Testament characters like Job and Jeremiah sometimes wondered aloud if God had "plugged His ears" to their cries of pain. Jesus put an abrupt and decisive end to such speculation. Not only had God not plugged His ears, He suddenly took on ears—literal, eardrum-ossicle cochlea human ears. On the cracked and dusty plains of Palestine, God's Son heard firsthand the molecular vibrations of human groans: from the sick and the needy, and from others who groaned more from guilt than from pain.

     Clear your mind and reflect for a moment on Jesus' life. He was the only person in history able to plan His own birth. Yet He humbled himself, trading in a perfect heavenly body for a frail body of blood and sinew and cartilage and nerve cells. The Bible says there is no temptation known to man that Jesus did not experience. He was lonely, tired, hungry, personally assaulted by Satan, besieged by leeching admirers, persecuted by powerful enemies.

     As for physical appearance, there's only one description of Jesus in the Bible, one written hundreds of years in advance by the prophet Isaiah: "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces . . . " (Isaiah 53:2-3).

     When Jesus first began his ministry, the people hooted, "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" An ancient ethnic joke: Jesus, the hick, the country bumpkin from Nazareth. In keeping with that reputation, He seemed to gravitate toward other rejects: those quarantined with leprosy, prostitutes, tax collectors, paralytics, notorious sinners.

     Jesus' neighbors once ran Him out of town and tried to kill Him. His own family questioned his sanity. The leaders of the day proudly reported that not one authority or religious leader believed in Him. His followers were a motley crew of fishermen and peasants, among whom the migrant farmhand would have felt comfortably at home. But in the end, even these forsook Him when Jesus' countrymen traded his life for that of a terrorist.

     No other religion—not Judaism, not Hinduism, not Buddhism or Islam—offers this unique contribution of an all—powerful God who willingly takes on the limitations and suffering of his creation. As Dorothy Sayers wrote,

For whatever reason God chose to make man as He is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death - He had the honesty and courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.

     The fact that Jesus came to earth where He suffered and died does not remove pain from our lives. But it does show that God did not sit idly by and watch us suffer in isolation. He became one of us. Thus, in Jesus, God gives us an up-close and personal look at his response to human suffering. All our questions about God and suffering should, in fact, be filtered through what we know about Jesus.

     How did God-on-earth respond to pain? When He met a person in pain, He was deeply moved with compassion (from the Latin words pati and cum, "to suffer with"). Not once did he say, "Endure your hunger! Swallow your grief!" When Jesus' friend Lazarus died, He wept. Very often, every time He was directly asked, He healed the pain. Sometimes He broke deep-rooted customs to do so, as when He touched a woman with a hemorrhage of blood, or when He touched outcasts, ignoring their cries of "Unclean!"

     The pattern of Jesus' response should convince us that God is not a God who enjoys seeing us suffer. I doubt that Jesus' disciples tormented themselves with questions like "Does God care?" They had visible evidence of his concern every day: they simply looked at Jesus' face.

     And when Jesus himself faced suffering, He reacted much like any of us would. He recoiled from it, asking three times if there was any other way. There was no other way, and then Jesus experienced, perhaps for the first time, that most human sense of abandonment: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" In the gospel accounts of Jesus' last night on earth, I detect a fierce struggle with fear, helplessness, and hope—the same frontiers all of us confront in our suffering.

     The record of Jesus' life on earth should forever answer the question, "How does God feel about our pain? In reply, God did not give us words or theories on the problem of pain. He gave us Himself. A philosophy may explain difficult things, but it has no power to change them. The Gospel, the story of Jesus' life, promises change.

The Execution

Love's as hard as nails
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (with all that is)
Our cross and his.
(C. S. Lewis, "Love's as Warm as Tears")

 

     There is one central symbol by which we remember Jesus. Today that image is coated with gold and worn around the necks of athletes and beautiful women, an example of how we can gloss over the crude reality of history. The cross was, of course, a mode of execution. It would be no more bizarre if we made jewelry in the shape of tiny electric chairs, gas chambers, and hypodermic needles, the preferred modern modes of execution.

     The cross, the most universal image in the Christian religion offers proof that God cares about our suffering and pain. He died of it. That symbol stands unique among all the religions of the world. Many of them have gods, but only one has a God who cared enough to become a man and to die.

     The scene, with the beatings and the sharp spikes and the slow torment of suffocation, has been recounted so often that we, who shrink from a news story on the death of a race horse or of baby seals, flinch not at all at its retelling. Unlike the quick, sterile executions we know today, this one stretched on for hours in front of a jeering crowd.

     The promises Jesus made must have seemed especially empty to the people of His day. This man a king? A mock king if ever there was one, with his brier crown. Someone had thrown a fine purple robe over Him, but blood from Pilate's beatings clotted on the cloth.

     More unlikely—this man God? Even for His disciples, who had pursued Him three years, it was too much to believe. They hung back in the crowd, afraid to be identified with the mock king. Their dreams of a powerful ruler who could banish all suffering turned into nightmares.

     Jesus' death is the cornerstone of the Christian faith, the most important fact of His coming. The gospels bulge with its details. He laid out a trail of hints and bald predictions throughout His ministry, predictions that were only understood after the thing had been done. What possible contribution to the problem of pain could come from a religion based on an event like the cross, where God Himself succumbed to pain?

     The apostle Paul called the cross a "stumbling block" to belief, and history has proved him out. Jewish rabbis question how a God who could not bear to see Abraham's son slain would allow His own Son to die. The Koran teaches that God, much too gentle to allow Jesus to go to the cross, substituted an evildoer in His place. Even today, U.S. television personality Phil Donahue explains his chief objection to Christianity: "How could an all-knowing, all-loving God allow His Son to be murdered on a cross in order to redeem my sins? If God the Father is so 'all-loving,' why didn't He come down and go to Calvary?"

     All of these objectors have missed the main point of the Gospel, that in some mysterious way it was God Himself who came to earth and died. God was not "up there" watching the tragic events conspire "down here." God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. In Luther's phrase, the cross showed "God struggling with God." If Jesus was a mere man, His death would prove God's cruelty; the fact that He was God's Son proves instead that God fully identifies with suffering humanity. On the cross, God Himself absorbed the awful pain of this world.

     To some, the image of a pale body glimmering on a dark night whispers of defeat. What good is a God who does not control His Son's suffering? But another sound can be heard: the shout of a God crying out to human beings, "I LOVE YOU." Love was compressed for all history in that lonely figure on the cross, who said that He could call down angels at any moment on a rescue mission, but chose not to—because of us. At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice.
     And thus the cross, a stumbling block to some, became the cornerstone of Christian faith. Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God's scheme ultimately leads back to the cross.

     At the end of the book of Job, God responded to questions about suffering by delivering a splendid lecture on His power. After Calvary, the emphasis shifts from power to love:

For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

     If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all—how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:31-32)

Why It Matters
     The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ provide more pain an abstract theological answer to the problem of pain. They also offer us actual, practical help in our own struggles with suffering . . .

     Human history revolves around not our experience of God, but His experience of us. On one level, of course, God understood physical pain, for He designed the marvelous nervous system that warns against harm. But had He, a Spirit, ever felt physical pain? Not until the Incarnation, the wrinkle in time when God Himself experienced what it is like to be a human being.

     In thirty-three years on earth Jesus learned about hardship and rejection and betrayal. And He learned too about pain: what it feels like to have an accuser leave the red imprint of his fingers on your face, to have a whip studded with metal lash across your back, to have a crude iron spike pounded through muscle, tendon, and bone. On earth, the Son of God learned all that.

     In some incomprehensible way, because of Jesus, God hears our cries differently. The author of Hebrews marvels that whatever we are going through, God has Himself gone through. "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin" (Hebrews 4:15).

     We have a high priest who, having graduated from the school of suffering, "is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness" (Hebrews 5:2). Because of Jesus, God understands, truly understands, our pain. Our tears become his tears. We are not abandoned . . .

     T.S. Eliot wrote in one of his Four Quartets:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

The surgery of life hurts. It helps me, though, to know that the Surgeon Himself, the Wounded Surgeon, has felt every stab of pain and every sorrow.

Taken from Where Is God When It Hurts? by Philip Yancey. Copyright © 1977, 1990 by Philip Yancey. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.